Beloved,
On Monday I took Vos for an eye exam at the recommendation of his pediatrician. The optometrist projected pictures of different shapes and sizes on the wall for Vos to identify. With both eyes open, he passed with flying colors. “Tree.” “Bird.” “Horse.” But the real test came when he covered my boy’s right eye, asking him to identify the same exact objects. Each time Vos responded by saying, “I can’t see anything.” He then covered his left eye and suddenly his ability to see was restored.
The doctor informed me that because one of Vos’s eyes is extremely cross-eyed, his brain had completely stopped using it. All this time I thought my boy was seeing just fine, but it turns out he has only been using one eye. Once a child reaches the age of eight or nine, there is nothing that can be done to fix this problem. Thankfully, because Vos’s four-year-old brain is still developing in some incredible ways, the doctor assured me that his eye can be retrained to see again. But it will require new glasses and an eye patch to be worn for 4-6 hours a day on his functioning eye. This will alleviate the pressure resulting from being cross-eyed and force the brain to begin using the left eye again with the goal that his sight will be restored.
Driving home from the optometrist, my heart was full of gratitude to God. Honestly, I had been a bit skeptical of the pediatrician’s recommendation. “Vos sees fine! This is just one more doctor to see and bill to pay.” But I couldn’t have been more wrong, and God was very gracious to bring this problem to light within the limited window of time it could be remedied.
The night before I had preached on Christ’s transfiguration and referenced Paul’s amazing words in 2 Corinthians 4:4-6: “In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. For what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake. For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” In our sin, our souls are blind to God’s glory in Christ, but through the Spirit-empowered preaching of the gospel God unblinds our souls to see the light. We sing of it often in Newton’s great hymn, “I once was blind, but now I see!”
I was reminded after Vos’s eye appointment, however, that there is a vast difference between seeing and seeing fully. How many Christians only see at half their capacity while they think the eyes of their souls are functioning just fine? They walk around with one spiritual eye closed, not utilizing the whole soul to reckon with the whole Christ. In the passage above, Paul speaks of the mind seeing (v. 4) and the heart seeing (v. 6). In biblical thought, these are different ways of speaking of the soul which we typically distinguish as consisting of three faculties: the intellect, the affections, and the will. The intellect focuses on the head. The affections focus on the heart. The will focuses on the hands. Arguably, the first two are the eyes with which we must see Christ while the third is the faculty by which we respond to that sight. In other words, we need the eye of the intellect working in tandem with the eye of the affections if our spiritual sight is to be robust and whole, leading us to serve Christ with radical abandon. But how rare it is to find a Christian with both eyes functioning at full capacity! Our particular temperaments, cultures, and ecclesiastical contexts often favor the head over the heart or the heart over the head, and we end up like Vos, thinking we are seeing just fine when in actuality we are only seeing with one eye. Sadly, some altogether lose the ability to think or feel deeply.
There is no question that in our circles the potential threat is to become all head and no heart. We rightly place a strong emphasis on the intellect and theological orthodoxy, but we tend to underemphasize the affections (that is a nice way of putting it!). If we are not careful, we can forget how to feel altogether, losing the capacity to see and savor Christ to the full extend God intends us to.
Sometimes we need to put an eye patch on our strong eye to retrain our weak eye to see. That is a fitting picture of what I think God is doing with us in our new sermon series on the Song of Songs. We are at home in the systematic theology of Romans, but many of us feel entirely out of place in the impassioned lyrics of this superlative song. It’s not comfortable wearing an eye patch on the strong eye to retrain the weak eye, and we might squirm in our chairs over the upcoming weeks as this intensely hot love poem is expounded and applied, wishing we could be in Romans instead! But my prayer is that our spiritual vision will be more clear and whole by the end of it as our affections are recalibrated to operate in unison with our intellect in knowing and enjoying our beloved Redeemer.
God created our souls with two eyes. We are not heartless heads. Solomon’s Song, more than any other book in the Bible, forces us to reckon with our affections. Let’s lean into it, asking God to teach us to feel with the goal of a more full-orbed, experiential acquaintance with Christ in His glory.
Yours,
Pastor Nick